After the last success with new Mandelbulb variations I extended the possible search space. These variations are also created from formulas from Tad Boniecki. Three of his variations followed these same basic forms.

See this blog post for all the details of the previous new variations. The only change here is adding a second trig call to the Y component. So now, the possible variants follow the pattern

This bumps the total possible variations up to 4096. After letting the PC churn away for a few hours I had all possible variations with thumbnails (I have avoided posting all 4096 images to flickr this time).

After deleting the spikey and lathed results this got the count of possibles down to 1288.

Deleting all the assymetrical results got the count down to 266 possibles.

Then comes the difficult part. You get down to a bunch of symmetric bulbs that fall into catagories of similar shapes and styles. Culling down the least interesting out of a bunch of 10 or so very similar images sent me cross eyed. In the end I narrowed 4096 down to 27.